California-based artist Raymond Pettibon began making his signature ink-wash drawings - combinations of cartoon-like images with short, enigmatic texts - in the 1980s. Since then he produced thousands of drawings in his unusual drafting style; framed or pinned directly on the wall, they are often combined by the dozens in no discernible order, like a giant scattered notebook. With solo exhibitions worldwide including a retrospective at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1994), Pettibon is considered one of the world's most significant innovators of figurative art.Poet and novelist Dennis Cooper speaks with the artist about recurring obsessions such as baseball, film noir, surfers and the animated figure Gumby. Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr examines the full scope of Pettibon's prolific career, setting the artist firmly within the tradition of Western figurative painting. Critic and curator Ulrich Loock looks at a single strand in Pettibon's oeuvre: a drawing centring onthe character Vavoom. The artist has chosen three extracts from The Art of English Poesie by George Puttenham, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, and Modern Painters by John Ruskin. This book also includes never-before-published scripts from as-yet-unmade videos on subjects from Jim Morrison to Hollywood.

Robert Storr is Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Formerly Senior Curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2004 he curated the 5th SITE Sante Fe Biennial in New Mexico. He was a contributing author to Phaidon's Louise Bourgeois (2003), Raymond Pettibon (2001) and Robert Mangold (2000) and has written regularly for magazines such as Artforum, Art in America, Frieze and Parkett.

Dennis Cooper, a novelist and critic, is a Contributing Editor to Artforum. He has published a number of novels, including Frisk (1991), as well as The Dream Police: Selected Poems 1969-93.

Ulrich Loock is Director of the Kunstmuseum Luzern and previously Director of the Kunsthalle, Bern. In 1995 he organized a major exhibition of Raymond Pettibon. He has written extensively on Conceptual and contemporary art in general, including the Survey text for Luc Tuymans, also published by Phaidon.